Handheld wireless communication devices are powered by one or more internal batteries. A major performance criterion for such devices is their battery life, and a large portion of battery power is consumed in a power amplification block of the device's transmitter. In many handheld wireless applications, a switched mode power supply, which provides the supply voltage to a power amplifier in the power amplification block, along with a switching regulator, is used to reduce overall power consumption. However, this requires careful control of the switched mode power supply to achieve optimal power savings. Many conventional designs use a fixed-step, or continuous control technique for controlling the switched mode power supply. However, the use of a switching regulator to reduce the supply voltage to the power amplifier, results in various difficulties in both factory calibration and device performance. For example, with these conventional switching control methods, there is a non-linearity in the control curve that results, which makes calibration and temperature compensation difficult.